Mike Lopresti column: Consider these as Final Four looms

Here is not your normal Final Four team anecdote. Nurses told Rick Pitino that the first time Kevin Ware cried, just before surgery, was as he watched his Louisville teammates talking about him on television.

This Final Four has faces now, one of them still in an Indianapolis hospital. So consider the many possibilities for Atlanta . . .

Pitino could go where no coach has gone before. Neither Wooden nor Krzyzewski nor Rupp. Nobody has won a national championship at two schools, let alone Louisville and Kentucky. That would be like a general winning a war for the North and the South.

The coach he could have to beat in the end is Jim Boeheim - the same guy he beat in 1996 at Kentucky, the same guy who once gave him a job, recognizing a phenom when he saw one. "That's why he was the first guy I hired when I got the job at Syracuse," Boeheim said Monday on a conference call. "I'm not stupid."

No. 9 Wichita State could become the lowest seed to play in a national championship game. And after this season, why not? "I don't think we're Cinderella at all," coach Gregg Marshall said. Well, yes you are. Might as well savor it. It'll sell a lot of T-shirts. Ask Florida Gulf Coast.

The lame duck Big East could take a thunderous last bow by having Syracuse and Louisville in the championship game. That'd be only the fourth time the same conference put both teams in the title bout, and first since the Big 12's Kansas and Oklahoma in 1988.

It could also soon be an ACC championship game.

The Louisville players will say they want to win it for Kevin Ware.

Michigan will play six freshmen, but nobody will call them the Fab Six.

Michigan's John Beilein could finally be recognized as the accomplished, if unheralded, coach he is. The nation could learn how he has never been an assistant in his 35-year career. How he has never been fired. How he grew up 120 miles from Jim Boeheim in upstate New York and once coached the Division II Le Moyne Dolphins, just down the road from Boeheim at Syracuse.

"I wouldn't suggest this route I took to anyone," he said Monday.

At 68 years and nearly five months, Boeheim could become the second oldest coach to win a national championship, clocking in six months younger than Connecticut's Jim Calhoun in 2011. And three years older than Mike Krzyzewski, who became No. 4 on the list in 2010. This decade has been good to geezers.

Wichita State could become the first unranked team to win a national championship in 25 years, since fellow Sunflower Stater Kansas in 1988.

The Shockers could become the first school from a non-BCS conference to win the national championship in 23 years. That means you, UNLV.

Louisville could be pushed to the end for a change. Its average winning margin in four tournament games is 21.75.

Michigan or Syracuse could become only the second No. 4 seed in history to win the championship, finally giving 1997 Arizona company.

Somebody will win in the final minute. Of the 64 games so far in this tournament, 40 have been decided by double figures. Only 10 by three points or fewer -- not all of them on Ohio State three-pointers, it just seems that way.

This season of constant unrest could end with the No. 1 of No. 1 seeds - Louisville - winning the championship. The guess is some of the net would go to Kevin Ware.

Or there could be one last surprise, when someone does to the Louisville men what the Louisville women just did to Baylor.

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Mike Lopresti column: Consider these as Final Four looms

Here is not your normal Final Four team anecdote. Nurses told Rick Pitino that the first time Kevin Ware cried, just before surgery, was as he watched his Louisville teammates talking about him on

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